Our Blog

19 Jun

Save Trees, Use a Bidet

Why fifteen million trees can be saved if Americans switched to bidets instead of toilet paper

Bath and Bidet image by Stefano Garau (via Shutterstock).

If you’ve seen the price of toilet tissue nowadays, you wonder why Mr Andrex and contemporaries can afford to feed the Labrador puppies or make good adverts. Each time we tear a strip of toilet tissue off the roll, we’ve done with it after flushing it down the toilet. We forget about its manufacturing process and recycling methods. Not least the amount of trees that are chopped for each six pack or twelve pack. In many other parts of the world, they say ‘yay’ to the bidet.

Why do, for example, mainland European countries plump for the bidet after using the lavatory? First, it saves on toilet tissue (they might be more savvier about the environment than us Brits). Secondly, it is cleaner and healthier for your nether regions than toilet paper. Which, if you remember Izal (or even) Bronco toilet paper from your childhood, is more than a good claim. Possibly a good advert for using a bidet.

There are also serious environmental concerns. According to Scientific American magazine, US citizens use 36.5 billion toilet rolls a year. We dread to think how much of that’s on the same weekend as the Superbowl. In the process, fifteen million trees are chopped, in the name of Kimberley Clark and countless other manufacturers.

Before a single roll gets to Walmart, it takes 473,587,500,000 gallons of water to produce the paper and 253,000 tons of chlorine. That is a serious amount of resources. Imagine what the figures could be like for the United Kingdom?

So, if you want to save money for toilet tissue and protect the environment, go for a bidet. After the initial spend, you are helping to save our planet in the long term. With the amount you spend on toilet tissue, you could save the money and have a Labrador puppy instead.